One of those gifted human beings is Turkey's chief prosecutor, Abdurahman Yalçınkaya. As a man with grey hair, and a robust posture, his eyes shine with the “light of science and reason” that Turkey's ruling elite has received from Atatürk, our founder, since the 20's. And thanks to that exceptional wisdom, he has uncovered the hidden American plot that I mentioned. He unearthed the stunning fact that Turkey's incumbent AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the U.S. government has been actually conspiring together to put the nail on the coffin of Atatürk and his legacy.

The Secret Plan for The Middle East

I am all serious. And, apparently, the chief prosecutor is, too. In the indictment he submitted to Turkey's Constitutional Court on March 15, he has the following paragraph:

“The accused party has eroded Turkey's image in the international community as a secular country… Turkey has started to be perceived as a ‘Moderate Islamic Republic.' This perspective has especially been reflected in the relation with the United States of America, and even in the official rhetoric. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and many other US officials, have ignored the fact that Turkey is a secular, democratic and social state of law, and rather defined our country as ‘Moderate Islamic Republic.' It is obvious that they have taken this offensive audacity from the rhetoric of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who very often reiterates that he is the co-president of the ‘Broader Middle East Project', which is a U.S. project aimed at ruling the related countries via moderate Islamic regimes.”

This is quite a gem, and a testimony to the wisdom of the chief prosecutor. He is obviously a close follower and a refined analyst of not only Turkish politics, but also world affairs.

Yet he seems to have made a few factual mistakes:

1) There is simply nothing that can be called as the “Broader Middle East Project” and can be defined as a “US project aimed at ruling the related [Middle Eastern] countries via moderate Islamic regimes.” President Bush spoke about a “Broader Middle East Initiative” in 2005, which was all about supporting democratic processes in the region. One can assume that the democracies that Bush had hoped for would also be better for US interests, but this not some sort of empire-building as the chief prosecutor believes. Moreover, that initiative seems to be quite ineffective by now, as the U.S. foreign policy had gradually shifted to a more “realist” paradigm.

2) The U.S. officials never spoke about, and even dreamt of, establishing a “moderate Islamic Republic” in Turkey. What has led Turkey's paranoid secularist to this totally bizarre idea is the fact that US officials sometimes noted, with positive terms, that Turkey, as a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, is also the home of a working democracy. (Well, we would actually have had a much more meaningful democracy if the chief prosecutor and his friends had left us alone.) The real problem is that Turkey's secularists are so obsessively hostile to religion that they can't stand to hear the words “Islam” and “Turkey” in the same sentence. When they hear that, their secularism detectors start to signal red alarms and they look for someone to blame. (Their ideological cousins in France recently got furious when President Sarkozy dared to mention the role of Christian values in the making of France. Yet they at least don't have secularist coups d'etat in France — at least since the golden age of the guillotine.)

3) The most amusing thing in the chief prosecutor's stunning paragraph on the “moderate Islam” conspiracy is that he refers to Prime Minister Erdoğan as “the co-president of the ‘Broader Middle East Project'.” Now, since there is no such thing as the Broader Middle East Project, what can our eloquent chief prosecutor be talking about?.. Well, after some meditation, I figured it out. What he is talking about is something totally unrelated: Erdoğan is the co-president of the “Dialogue of Civilizations” project, whose other partner is Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, and which is one of the many cultural efforts to overcome the chilling idea of “clash of civilizations.” This Turko-Spanish cultural effort, of course, has nothing to do neither with the U.S. government nor establishing “moderate Islamic regimes” in the Middle East.

Very High Judiciary

To make a long story short, the chief prosecutor has in fact no idea about what he is speaking about. He probably heard all these confusing terms — Broader Middle East, Dialogue of Civilizations, moderate Islam, blah-blah — and placed all of them in a totally fictional conspiracy theory.

This might give you a sense of the high standards of Turkey's high judiciary. Of course there is some variation there, and the chief prosecutor might not be representing the whole. But he definitely represents quite many. The problem with these people — who are no doubt patriotic, decent, and principled — is that they have very little understanding of the contemporary world. They are seeing everything through the lens of a stagnant ideology that was formed in the 1930s, and they resist any change, because that ideology been turned into a sacred dogma. And the fantasies of the adherents of that dogma is the only realm in which a plot to overthrow the Turkish Republic, whether by the U.S. or by the AKP, exists.